Personally I have not met that much hostility, rather suspicion and mockery. Well, that didn't last :) And anyway was nothing to someone who's been growing as a Jew in USSR :)

All the same I am definitely underpaid compared to male peers because I have less options - plenty of companies simply won't consider female CIO to start with. Barring major relocation it limits opportunities severely, so company is less motivated to retain.

Brief answers:1. No, one does not need to be an idiot to be hostile to cheaper workforce. There are are numerous reasons beyond sheer cost. For instance, perceived reliability (women are perceived to be more devoted to their family and take more sick days), misevaluation due to perceived inferiority (tnere have been studies indicating that the same sample work has been evaluated differently by experts depending on the gender of the evaluated oerson, even when the evaluator was female), perceived potential for unfair promotion. 2. Yes, the high tec industry does look very much as a collection of idiots.

I've been in that industry for 20 years. There are plenty of women in it. Some are quite high up and are paid alot better than me (I'm a systems architect, currently in a large investment bank), but rarely they are in "productive" positions. That doesn't mean they are useless - to the contrary. But they rarely create, design or do deep debugging. Thay prefer areas like project management, account administration, security design or advisory, user support - anythung that has a more or less defined set of rules and recipes and doesn't recuire a lot of creativity.